InfoPath Dev

Hi,

I’ve reviewed the treads on this site, but I am unable to find a solution to my issue.

I’m trying to use element of a Share Point list with 9,000 entries, being looked up and pulled into a infopath form.

The share point list contains a list of contractors… The company they work for, their name and other details relating them

The form consists of multiple drop down boxes,  (1) company (2) Surname (3) forename..etc

The issue I have is, the sharepoint list company field, contain multiple entries of the same company as well as blanks…

To stop the first field on the dropdown containing 9000 items, when there are only 45 different companies to choose from… is there any code I can use to enable the dropdown list to show only one occurrence from these multiple entries…

Any help would be greatly received

I'm a bit concerned about populating a dropdown box using 9,000 items (even if you do show only the unique ones), but dropdown boxes have an option in their properties to show only entries with unique display names. Have you tried using that option?

Sorry I should have explained better, I’ve tick the box (Show only entries with unique display names), but some of the fields in the company column are blank ( contractor doesn’t belong to a company)...

For some reason the blank values don’t pull through the associated value into the next drop down, when this buttons ticked

is this because blanks are classed as ~null~ values, therefore treated differently

 Are you using the same field for both the Display and Value field, or two different fields? When the box is filtered to show unique display names, each selection will apply to just one actual value behind the scenes, so if the blanks correspond to multiple values, that could be the source of your issue.

I’ve done some testing since, I duplicated the list structure in a play pen we have set up, updated the blanks (null fields) with a value of test… updated the connection and the form worked perfectly…. the Blank values are corrupting the lookup in some way…

Thank you for your help – I think the quickest way to fix this would be to update the nulls with a value…